Cambridge, MA — Thursday, 16 June 2011 — The AcaWiki project has announced their summer drive to gather summaries for the top 100 academic papers around the world. The AcaWiki website (http://acawiki.org) features an updated logo and theme that brings it into alignment with Wikipedia and other popular Wikis. AcaWiki continues to make strides in improving global access and exposure to academic research and scientific findings. When completed this new list of top papers, along with the over 500 summaries already available, will provide a solid base to fill the needs of many students and academics doing research.

“Our goal for this summer is to collect a clear set of summaries of the top papers from every field,” explained AcaWiki’s founder, Neeru Paharia. “This is a huge task, and one that we will not be able to achieve without the active participation of students and academics from every discipline. While AcaWiki has a growing collection with well over 500 Creative Commons licensed summaries of academic papers, we want more coverage in fields such as economics, psychology, sociology, business, and computer science. In order to do this, we need leaders, and readers, in all major fields of research to join us.”

The AcaWiki project addresses two key problems in the public access and understanding of modern academic research. While the overall volume of significant, cutting-edge research is growing apace, the dissemination of important findings and results is mostly limited to traditional, subscription-based publishing outlets and peer-reviewed journals. Even research that is publicly funded is often not made readily available to the general public, while universities in developing countries are often cut off from access to knowledge by exorbitant subscription fees for standard journals. Since a lot of academic research is couched in jargon that can only be understood by experts, the problem of limited access to knowledge is compounded by a very real deficit in communication between academia and the general public, as well as between academic disciplines themselves.

AcaWiki offers a workable solution to both of these problems by making use of social software and leveraging a community of graduate students, academics, and citizens, to write summaries and long abstracts of academic papers. Contributors are encouraged to write two-to-three paragraph summaries of academic papers and contribute them to the AcaWiki pool. Unlike the original articles themselves, the copyright for these summaries belongs to the contributor. AcaWiki stipulates that all entries on the site be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so they are free for international distribution via the Internet or in hard copy. Other contributors can annotate, comment, or append information to the original entry, adding greater nuance or clarity.

Along with community leaders Mike Linksvayer, Jodi Schneider, Reid Priedhorsky and others, the open production company, Fabricatorz is improving AcaWiki and growing the project. “By updating the AcaWiki logo with the great design by Aleksander Stachurka, we hope to crystallize the reality of the project,” said Jon Phillips, Fabricatorz Founder. “And, by switching to the default MediaWiki theme, as seen on all Wikimedia Foundation Wikis, we are making it easier to be compatible with the majority of real Wiki communities and developers. We want to collect more high quality academic summaries and to encourage more students and researchers to use the site and help us achieve our goal.”

The project has released a public roadmap for the next three to six months on its website at: http://acawiki.org/Roadmap Beyond summarizing academic papers, the Roadmap is an open plan for others to help by filing bugs and developing plans for making AcaWiki a better resource and community.

Targeted List of Disciplines

* Anthropology
* Arts and Literarure
* Astronomy
* Biology
* Business
* Chemistry
* Clinical Research
* Computer Science
* Economics
* Education
* Engineering
* Geosciences
* Health
* Mathematics
* Medicine
* Neuroscience
* Philosophy
* Physics
* Psychology
* Sociology

For More Information

* http://acawiki.org
* http://acawiki.org/Top_100_Papers

About AcaWiki

AcaWiki is like “Wikipedia for academic research” designed to collect summaries and literature reviews of peer-reviewed academic research, and make them available to the general public. AcaWiki is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with seed funding from the Hewlett Foundation.

Press Contact

* Jon Phillips, press@acawiki.org, +1.415.830.3884

Press Kit

* http://acawiki.org/about
* Release as PDF
* Release as ODT

The Fabricatorz recently capped off an exciting and eventful week at the 6th annual Libre Graphics Meeting, in Montreal. The 4-day Conference was packed with developers and users of free software including Inkscape, Scribus, Gimp, Blender, DeviantArt, and many more. Developer Brad Phillips closed out the Day One talks with a guide to making our unique avatars, as well as announcing the Release of Open Clip Art Library 3.0.

As the talks rolled into Day Two, Christopher Adams revealed the highly-anticipated, refreshed Open Font Library, to much adulation.

The hits kept coming through Day Four, when Fabricatorz Founder, Jon Phillips, unveiled the Milkymist video synthesizer, alongside a vision of an open hardware future for LGM.

The Fabricatorz want to send out a big thanks to all involved in organizing and hosting events for this year’s Libre Graphics Meeting. More great events and Releases lay ahead, as we look forward to the rest of 2011!

Montreal, May 13, 2011- More than 200 active developers, artists, and attendees of the 6th Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 in Montreal were able to see the Milkymist One video synthesizer (http://milkymist.org) live for the first time, to entertain and surprise them between talks and during breaks. Real-time video synthesis with audio and video input had been available before in proprietary packages combining multiple devices and costing several thousand USD. Milkymist One combines this into a small form factor, and uses only free software and free hardware acceleration.

“The Milkymist One is the future of live performance and is the real freedom box, available now. Without a truly open hardware architecture, developers working on free and open software are going to be locked out from the future of development,” said Jon Phillips, Fabricatorz Founder and Qi Hardware Co-founder. “I am extremely proud to use the Milkymist One live at the event, and explain why its so important for the future of Libre Graphics.”

Phillips is giving a final keynote presentation at LGM2011 where he is presenting the future of Libre Graphics, moving from developers on desktop systems they control, to network services outward towards embedded hardware for making graphics.

Later that night, Milkymist One will be featured during the Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 closing ceremony in Montreal at an event called Geepsters.

The Milkymist project is an informal organization of people and companies who develop, manufacture and sell a comprehensive open source solutions (http://qi-hardware.com) for the live synthesis of interactive visual effects for video performance artists, clubs and musicians. The project goes great lengths to apply the open source principles at every level possible, and is best known for the Milkymist system-on-chip (SoC) which is among the first commercialized system-on-chip designs with free HDL source code. Several Milkymist technologies have been reused in applications unrelated to video synthesis, such as NASA’s Communication Navigation and Networking Reconfigurable Testbed (CoNNeCT).

Milkymist One is currently available in limited quantities to early adopters, and will be available later this summer for general use, at a target price of 499 USD.

Montreal, May 12, 2011 – Today at the 6th Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 in Montreal, the Open Clip Art Library along with its commercial stewards, the Fabricatorz, have launched the biggest, most featureful version of everyone’s favorite public domain library of clip art, a collection that is free to use for any reason.

Lead developer of Open Clip Art Library and Fabricatorz Developer, Brad Phillips said, “This is our biggest release ever! We have fixed loads of bugs, and Fabricatorz have been leading an effort to create a traditional favorites system so all clip art may be rated by any artist. We have been actively working to close bugs and implement feature requests.”

Additional features include a new sorting category, displaying on the main page, that takes advantage of the new favorites system by listing clip art according to most popular. There is now enhanced profile management capabilities and also an ability to list links to a user’s different profiles. There are 50+ bug fixes on this 3.0 release that make the entire project work smoothly. And, now its easy to generate bitmap images on-demand, thanks to the contribution from user boobaloo from the project.

A major feature added in this release is the batch management action bar. This tool allows for librarians to add or delete clip art searches and tags. For normal artists (users) it allows for the ability to add to and remove clip art from collections. Collections is a feature from the last release so that themed sets of clip art are combined by someone.

As has come to be expected in recent Releases, a brand new Package of themed clip art is out. Open Clip Art Library 3.0′s theme is ‘Famous People’, and the package contains dozens of newly created graphics for all uses, many of which have been contributed by attendees of workshops at LGM 2011.

For all users and services using the Open Clip Art Library, Fabricatorz is a commercial production company that actively adds features to the Open Clip Art Library. Fabricatorz founder, Jon Phillips states, “The Fabricatorz stand ready to add desired features like a Request System, an Artist Donation System, and a Showcase section on the site. For any businesses, services or benefactors that are interested in these features, we want to work with you to realize new features on the project.”

3.0 Highlights

* Favorites system sprinkled throughout the site
* Most popular category on the main page
* Users can add multiple links to their profiles
* Batch management (collections and clipart management)
* 2 active events, famous people, doudou linux logo
* 50+ bug fixes
* Simpler personal information management
* Embed controls for clip art

Downloads

We now provide monthly customized packages related to monthly themes. Please follow the url below to download the latest packages.

http://openclipart.org/packages

About Open Clip Art Library

Since 2004, the Open Clip Art Library (http://www.openclipart.org/) aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that may be freely used. All graphics submitted to the project are placed into the Public Domain according to the Creative Commons Public Domain Declaration. The site is powered by the Aiki Framework (http://aikiframework.org), a new web framework using the AGPL license. The Open Clip Art Library. Drawing Together.

About Fabricatorz

The Fabricatorz (http://fabricatorz.com) is a “open” production company that makes successful projects from start to finish, including development and community management. We specialize in Free and Open Source Software, Creative Commons technology, growing on-line and off-line communities in San Francisco, China and the Arab World. Our core focus is in developing software using Aiki Framework, hardware using Qi Hardware, and community-building around the philosophies of Sharism.

For More Information

* http://openclipart.org
* http://aikiframework.org
* http://fabricatorz.com

Press Contact
Jon Phillips press@fabricatorz.com
+1.415.830.3884 San Francisco + China

Beijing, Tuesday, March 22, 2011

The Mozilla Drumbeat Hackfest is coming to Beijing. The 2011 China Drumbeat is organized around the theme of citizen science on the web, and has attracted some of the world’s leading developers in this field to participate. The Hackfest takes place from March 23 – 25, 2011 and is to be hosted at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

The goal the 2011 China Mozilla Drumbeat is to increase public awareness of citizen science on the web, and partner open source developers with the scientific community to build prototypes and solutions for “citizen cyberscience” in China. The Hackfest is for web developers, mobile app developers, processor enthusiasts, online game developers and virtual world enthusiasts.

The first night of China Mozilla Drumbeat Hackfest, Wednesday March 23, Mozilla is hosting a Firefox 4 Release Party from 9:30 until 11:30 at the Rainbow Club. It is a night of fun, music and celebration for the global launch around the world of the most free, open and secure web browser, Mozilla Firefox. This is a free and open event, but registration is required prior:
http://mozilla.com.cn/event/25-ff4-launch-party/

The main two days of the Hackfest on March 22 – 23 are focused on “citizen cyberscience” which includes volunteer computing projects such as SETI@home, BOINC, CAS@home, and LHC@home. These projects all leverage the power of distributed computing to aid basic scientific research.

A Drumbeat Hackfest is a live collaborative event where tools and technologies that support the open web are designed and created. The 2011 China Drumbeat welcomes the participation of developers with skills in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, data visualization, distributed computing, mobile computing and online gaming. Participating developers can take advantage of this opportunity to aid the scientific community and increase public uptake of volunteer computing using the latest in web technologies.

The Hackfest opens on March 23, 2011 with an evening of speeches by Francois Grey, Coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre and initiator of the Africa@home and Asia@home citizen cyberscience projects; as well as team leaders from SETI@home, BOINC, CAS@home, LHC@home, EpiCollect, the Quake Catcher Network Project, and the Computing for Clean Water Project. Fabricatorz Christopher Adams and Jon Phillps are also in Beijing supporting and hacking at the event with the teams and creating news.

March 24 and 25 will see full-day hackfest sessions with scientists and developers to take on new challenges and help enhance volunteer computing through rapid software and product prototyping.

The Fabricatorz are proud to be participating and supporting this event. Christopher Adams and Jon Phillips will be the master of ceremonies at the Firefox Release Party. We hope to see you there!

About China Mozilla Drumbeat Hackfest

More Information in English and Chinese:

• http://mozilla.com.cn/event/23-drumbeat-en/
• http://mozilla.com.cn/event/24-drumbeat-cn/

About Firefox 4 Release Party

http://mozilla.com.cn/event/25-ff4-launch-party/

Rainbow Bar
彩虹轩酒吧

Address:
B1, Tower C, Science Plaza, Tsing hua Science Park, Wu Dao Kou
北京市海淀区清华科技园科技大厦C座地下一层

UPDATE: So many people have registered, so we had to get a bigger venue! Please take note!

Wen Jin Hotel B1, Chamber bar (The hotel is close to Tsing Hua South Gate.)
北京市海淀区中关村东路一号清华科技园文津国际酒店地下一层璨酒吧（文津酒店
在清华南门旁边）

About Mozilla Drumbeat

Drumbeat is a global community of innovators like you, building a more awesome web and world. Connect with others. Find projects that need your help. Or share your own. https://www.drumbeat.org/

About Fabricatorz

The Fabricatorz is a “open” production company that makes successful projects from start to finish, including development and community management. We specialize in Free and Open Source Software, Creative Commons technology, growing on-line and off-line communities in San Francisco, China and the Arab World. We develop software with Aiki Framework, hardware using Qi Hardware, and build communities around the philosophies of Sharism.

http://fabricatorz.com/

Press Contact

• Jon Phillips
• press@fabricatorz.com
• Global +1-415-830-8334
• China +86-187-1003-9974

Cutting edge creative tools meet free culture

May 10-13, Ecole Polytechnique Engineering School

Programmers and artists from around the world are headed to Montreal for the 6th annual Libre Graphics Meeting in May. The Libre Graphics Meeting is an annual gathering for the users and developers of free and open source creative software: artistic tools that are free for anyone to use and modify. LGM gives software developers, artists, musicians, designers and other creative professionals the opportunity to collaborate, share their work and learn from each other.

A Preview

Every year, Libre Graphics Meeting focuses on individual and group interaction, emphasizing free media and the software that produces it. This year’s attendees can expect a similar format that will include workshops, presentations, demonstrations, and birds-of-a-feather (BOF) sessions. Leading up to the conference, special lab sessions bring developers and artists face-to-face to make improvements in creative software. Gaps can form when developers and their users don’t meet face to face; LGM gives artists and educators a voice in the building of their tools. Both content creators and developers will present, bringing a diverse community together to advance the technologies and strategies of high-quality free creative software.

Submit a talk!

LGM’s strength comes from the presenters who talk about their work and inspire others by sharing their experiences, techniques, and best practices. Whether you are a developer, an artist, or an enthusiast, you can be a part of this year’s event by sharing your story and your work.

The LGM community wants to hear your proposal for a session. Submit your idea any time between now and April 1, 2011 by visiting http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/Conference_2011/Submit_Talk

Topics of interest include: development of the applications, color standards and color management, designer and developer collaboration, web services, workflow, exchange between floss and artists, power-user techniques, and graphics business best practices.

• Proposals should have a title
• Describe your proposal in at most two paragraphs
• Include a short bio & contact informations
• Include any special technical setup you require other than radio-microphone, beamer, laser pointer, computer, network
• Talks are 30 minutes including Q&A and setup.
• Lightning talks are 5 minutes
• Tell us if you have specific date & time constraint to present your talk
• Tell us if your trip to LGM is already sponsored or if you need help from LGM to get to Montreal. In the last case, please evaluate your needs (cost of economy plane ticket for the round trip, for instance).

Help keep LGM free

Libre Graphics Meeting is an invaluable meeting ground for industry leaders and end users alike. It has also been free of charge since the very beginning — but as the open source community continues to expand, attendance keeps increasing.

Your support is a vital means for the continued success of LGM, whether you are a readers, an attendee, or simply a fan of free graphics software. Click here to make a donation: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/14610

Highlights from LGM 2010

Last year’s Libre Graphics Meeting, the fifth since the project’s inception, took place in Brussels and was highlighted by important work on open color management systems and data interchange formats. The vector graphics standard file format, SVG, headlined many of the the discussions and interaction that took place, as it has become an integral element in communicating freely created content through websites and printed pieces. All major projects represented at LGM 2010 — Scribus, Gimp, Inkscape, and Open Font Library — spent time planning activities for the months and years ahead. Other hot topics in presentations and discussions included Blender, Krita, Open Web Graphics and Services, Python, Rawstudio, and many more.

Continuing with the success of recent LGM incarnations, more attention was given to the rising numbers of professional graphics users and youth attendees. In fact, of the 51 sessions held during the 4 day extravaganza, 20 were given by creative professionals. Specific workshops were organized to engage students from art and design schools around the world. [http://lwn.net/Articles/390572/ Nathan Willis] writes of one such event:

”Denis Jacquerye, widely known from his work with the DejaVu fonts, discussed font design and features for African languages, encouraging the community to build more such fonts.”

About the Libre Graphics Meeting

The Libre Graphics Meeting exists to unite and accelerate the efforts behind Free, Libre and Open Source creative software. Organised by volunteers from the international Libre Graphics Community since 2006, this annual meeting is the premiere conference for developers, users and supporters of projects such as GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/), Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/), Blender (http://www.blender.org/), Krita (http://koffice.org/krita/), Scribus (http://www.scribus.net/), Hugin (http://hugin.sourceforge.net/), the Open Clipart Library (http://www.openclipart.org/), and the Open Font Library (http://www.openfontlibrary.org/). At LGM, teams gather to work on interoperability, shared standards, and new ideas. Work at prior LGMs has pushed the state of the art in important areas such as color management, cross-application sharing of assets, and common formats.

For More Information

For more information, visit http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org

Get involved by joining the Create mailinglist (http://create.freedesktop.org) or propose a talk via http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/Conference_2011/Submit_Talk

—-

”LGM 2011 is hosted by the [http://create.freedesktop.org Libre Graphics Community] and Polytechnique”

Press Contact

• Sponsoring Organization: Libre Graphics Meeting and Create Project.
• Contact: Jon Phillips
• Contact email: jon@fabricatorz.com
• Phone (USA): +1.415.830.3884
• Website: http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/
• Pledgie campaign: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/14610
• Photos: http://ur1.ca/a34y

Organization Contact

• Contact: Louis Desjardins
• Contact email: louis.desjardins@gmail.com
• Phone (MONTREAL): +1.514.994.9351

Today, the Fabricatorz announced the Release of Aiki Framework 0.8, an ultra-fast and intuitive open web development framework that serves as the foundation for much of our finest work. The Announcement highlights many notable improvements to the software:

Helping to further bridge the gap between development and live site results, an SQL Query test box has been added to the top of Aiki’s Admin interface. Here, site architects can run database queries and test their results before committing code to a widget.

To learn more about how Aiki Framework can increase your web productivity, have a look at the Official Press Release and download the software.

Today, the Open Clip Art Librarians are Officially Releasing the Latest Version of their website: Open Clip Art Library 2.9. This newest iteration, the first of the new year, again focuses on the end-user experience, along with filling out the ever-expanding body of art the site contains.

Kicking things off, a long-standing bug has been fixed in a major way. One of OCAL’s leading contributors, johnny_automatic, has gone through a gigantic list of clip art that had been previously not been connected to the site in transition from Open Clip Art lIbrary’s upgrade to 2.0, last spring and brought all of it back to life. As a result, OCAL’s collection has been fully restored to it’s original glory and the current Clip Art Tally stands at nearly 40,000 images!

Longtime visitors will also notice a major menu-item change. A new section, Collections, has replaced Packages. Users will still find information and links to download their favorite packages in this new section, but the change reflects a long-gestating idea that will shift the direction of content from managers of the site to it’s users. With Collections, any user is able to save a Clip Art that they love to a group that they themselves have created. Found a really useful set of icons? Create a Collection & share them with the Community, as a set! The latest Collections are displayed in this new section. As Collections grow and more data is gathered, this section will become vital to the new direction that The Open Clip Art Library will be shifting towards in future Releases.

Another key librarian turned developer, Chovynz, has made great strides in several key bugs, including a few related to Clip Art Comments. Registered users can now log into OCAL, select their ‘My Cliparts’ section, scroll to the bottom of the page and see a list of the most recent comments made on their uploaded works!

New work continues to drive Open Clip Art Library’s progress. A new package has been made available with this release. Chinese New Year 2011 contains work related to the yearly shift, created by the Artists of OCAL’s expanding Community. Users wishing to contribute to the next Release’s package, Presidents, can do so by tagging any related work with the key term “presidents”.

The Fabricatorz are pushing The Open Clip Art Library to this next plateau with our development the Aiki Framework, the software engine that powers OCAL. We would like to thank everyone else who have helped this project continue to grow and succeed. You can also help find bugs and submit your feature requests, or join us as a librarian today! Please check out Open Clip Art Library to upload your clip art.

UPDATE: Don’t forget to check out all the great contributions towards this 2.9 release.

The Fabricatorz are on the road this week, kicking off 2011 the right way. Founder, Jon Phillips will be teaming up with Matt Hope to bring the Laoban Soundsystem to The Border Show. The exhibition, organized by The Society for Experimental Cultural Production, features recent art concerning border mechanisms of the Pearl River Delta:

Taking place inside a set of shipping containers placed amid the hulking post-industrial buildings of the New Territories halfway between the urban cores of Hong Kong and Shenzhen, this exhibition proposes a new relationship between these two cities and the wider region by approaching the ontology of the border crossing.

The event kicks off on January 8 (running through the 28th of the month). Laoban will be providing the musical backdrop for the entire opening evening!

In the coming weeks, Laoban Soundsystem will be releasing new plans, photos, and even more media through it’s homepage. For more details on The Border Show, check out the event page, and look check this space again soon for recaps and photos from Hong Kong!

Aiki Framework kicks things off with it’s latest: Version 0.7. A renewed focus on usability and speed highlight much of the development cycle. With some great contributions from Roger Martin, project lead (and Fabricatorz Developer) Bassel Safadi presents back-end systems that have been revamped and polished to deliver content at lightning speed. Pretty URLs, a hotly requested feature, has made it’s way into the new Release, complete with documentation. Developer control continues to drive bug fixes and revisions. Once system-dependent, Aiki Alert messages have been retooled to allow complete handling, via CSS.

Aiki’s leading site, The Open Clip Art Library is showing no signs of slowing down with it’s 2.8 Release. Fabricatorz Developer Brad Phillips brings in a new “Collections” feature, in which registered users can create sets that contain the clip arts of their choosing! The process begins by finding the perfect image and selecting “+Add to Collection” on the right-hand side of the details page. Created Collections are displayed on each user’s profile page. This Release is marked by an update of the site to use Creative Commons latest CC Zero Public Domain Dedication tool. Jon Phillips says of the new Dedication:

“Open Clip Art Library is used all around the world by Wikipedia, teachers, artists, and plain old Mom’s as a key source for graphics. By updating our licensing tool, we are in compliance with the latest Creative Commons recommendation for releasing works into the public domain globally, and leading on the net with trying to increase sharing. This type of sharism is crucial to the open web.”

For more information about the latest Aiki Framework and Open Clip Art Library offerings (including new themed content), check out the Official Press Release. To get involved and help bring these projects to even greater heights in upcoming releases, take a look a look at the Launchpad blueprints for both Aiki Framework and The Open Clip Art Library.